All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Santi War Radio.
And our first guest on the show today is Phyllis Bennis from the Institute for Policy Studies.
She directs the New Internationalism Project there.
She's got a really long, in-depth bio here, but I think most important is that she's written eight books on foreign policy.
The war on terrorism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Iraq war, and probably most important for our purposes, a primer ending the U.S. war in Afghanistan written in 2010.
She's got a piece that's running.
I'm not sure where it started, but now it's at antiwar.com today, The Phases of War, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Israel.
Welcome back to the show.
Phyllis, how are you?
Still good.
Great to be with you.
Okay, good.
Yeah, it's been quite a while since we've talked.
Good to have you back on the show.
Great article that you've got here.
Thank you.
Let's start with Afghanistan.
As you do in the piece, it's 2012.
Why don't you give us your snapshot, your point of view anyway, of the state of the American war in Afghanistan, spring 2012.
I'm glad that you called it what it is, Scott.
This is very much an American war in Afghanistan, and we've lost.
This was a war we lost before the war began, to quote a line from the great antiwar folk singer Phil Oaks, must have been 30, 35 years ago.
This was a war we were never going to win, and what's happening now is that more and more, quote, incidents are becoming public, and each time we're being told, oh, this is really too bad.
This is not what our soldiers are about.
This is not what our military represents, whether it's the most recent photographs of U.S. soldiers with body parts from dead Afghans sort of draped over their shoulders as if it was a joke, the burning of the Korans, the urinating on dead Afghan bodies, and most importantly, most horrifically, of course, the killing of 17 civilians, at least nine of them children, by one or more U.S. soldiers outside of Kandahar.
And this crime we're being told over and over again, and it may well be true, oh, he must have snapped.
He must have PTSD.
Well, almost all the soldiers coming back do have some kind of post-traumatic disorder, whether it's full-scale PTSD or not, I don't know.
And did he snap?
That's certainly possible, too.
What it doesn't take into account are two critical things that we simply never hear about.
Number one, we never hear that Afghans snap.
We hear about an attack on a U.S. soldier by his Afghan comrade in the military or in the Afghan police, and immediately we're told, oh, this is really bad.
This means that the Taliban has infiltrated the Afghan military who love and respect our soldiers.
We never hear the Afghan snapped.
Maybe his baby daughter had been killed the night before in a drone attack.
Maybe he had seen his home village destroyed by U.S. bombing.
But no, we never acknowledge that maybe an Afghan might snap.
The other thing that we never hear about...
Well, and even on that, you know, snap is really just, you know, when it's an American, it's a built-in excuse that they didn't make a decision to do something horrible.
It's this thing, you know, Marge, liquor's drunkened me kind of an excuse.
Right, they just lost control.
But you're right, though, because still the lie built in there is that if anyone was to ever frag an American soldier, it has to be a Taliban infiltrator, and then his motivation is his Taliban-ness, not he wants to shoot an American, and maybe even that's why he allied with the Taliban in the first place if he even allied with the Taliban in the first place.
Exactly, and I think that, you know, what we're hearing about over and over again is that this is an exception.
Urinating on bodies is an exception.
Burning Korans is an exception.
Killing children is an exception.
This is not what we stand for.
The problem is, this is exactly what we stand for in Afghanistan.
Not because anybody chooses to do that.
It's the nature of this kind of a war, which is a war to control territory, to suppress a people.
What happens is exactly that.
What happens is you have to demonize them in the eyes of the soldiers.
How many soldiers anywhere in the world are prepared to go into a village of sleeping people in houses at 3 o'clock in the morning and just shoot children?
The only time that happens, and it's almost every war now, is when the, quote, enemy has been so demonized, and it comes back to how our country was founded when we committed genocide against native people, the slogan was, Knits make light, which was a way of justifying the killing of Indian children.
It was because they would grow up to be Indian adults, so it's fine to kill them.
It's the same analogy that holds true today with our soldiers in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Pakistan, in Yemen, in Djibouti, anywhere else in the world that they're from.
It's funny, because where you started was, this was a war that we never could have won, but this is the second war, right?
The first war that was easy to win was bombing the hell out of the Taliban and forcing them out of Kabul for a while.
The war we can't win is the war against the people of Afghanistan to make them submit to our rule.
That's the war we can't win, and that's the war that, as you're saying, puts these guys in the context of, the only difference between a so-called militant enemy that it's okay to shoot and a civilian is one's holding a rifle, but they're all civilians.
There is no military force there.
But I also think that we have to be a little bit careful about thinking that that first stage of this war, the attacks that led to the overthrow of the Taliban, were somehow, that was the good war, that was the war we could win.
Yeah, we can overthrow a government.
Oh yeah, no, I never meant it was good, I just meant it was possible.
It was possible to overthrow a government, yeah.
That's a far cry from winning a war.
Yeah, yeah, no, that was just a matter of carpet bombing for a few weeks, and they ran to the hills, and then the loss began.
They left behind, that carpet bombing didn't just hit Taliban officials, or Taliban soldiers, or Taliban militants, it hit people.
We didn't go to war in Afghanistan against, quote, terrorism.
We went to war against Afghans.
And it's Afghans who died.
So we have to always be thinking about that, even in this notion, you're absolutely right, Scott, it was easy for the U.S. dropping bombs from far away to knock out a government.
It wasn't possible to do that without killing huge numbers of Afghans, sending even more numbers of Afghans fleeing for their lives, dying of cold, of exposure, and starvation in the mountains.
And we know the stories of that, we know the claim that the U.S. was going to send food drops, and they wrapped the food in bright yellow packages of plastic that were exactly the same color as the bombs they had dropped that had now become anti-personnel mines that were being picked up by children, the exact same bright yellow color as the food drops.
Yeah, the cluster bomb duds, which is a certain pretty big percentage of the cluster bomb droplets, or whatever, the smaller units.
Right, the bomblets.
Yeah, I think people forget about that, but what that means is, oh, look, bright plastic, and who's most likely to go around throwing up a little piece of yellow plastic on the ground by a child.
That looks like a toy, exactly.
It is interesting, though, that the Empire really, I mean, they bragged, right, that, ah, we're going to give the Russians their own Vietnam, you can't possibly win a war against the people of Afghanistan, even if the Soviets killed two million of them, they still won't be able to really conquer the place, but then we think, really, our establishment thinks, really, they can do better in a land the size of Texas, or a state like Colorado, if you're standing there.
Forget it.
It's ridiculous on its face, and I was a stupid nobody cab driver in 2001, and I told you all so, like, a week after 9-11, or sooner.
You can't do that.
You can't just take over Afghanistan and think you can rule it, unless you're willing to just use hydrogen bombs, but then you can't occupy it anyway, because of all the gamma rays.
There's a reason that Afghanistan was long known as the graveyard of empires, and we have proved it once again.
Our empire, as you say, is exactly no different.
It's amazing, the hubris, but I guess if the point of the war is just to keep fighting, or make sure that Iran and Pakistan and India can't all work together on a pipeline for at least a long time from now, or something, then...
There's people in this country, of course, corporations that have profited enormously from the continuation of this war.
All right, I'm sorry, we have to leave it right there for a moment, and go out to this break.
Everybody, it's Phyllis Bennis from the Institute for Policy Studies.
She's got this great piece we're running on Antiwar.com today, The Phases of War, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Israel.
We're going to have to change the subject when we get back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm talking with Phyllis Bennis from the Institute for Policy Studies.
She wrote this piece, The Phases of War, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Israel.
We're running it at Antiwar.com today.
Phyllis, before your first segment, we were talking a little bit about Marco Rubio's big speech, basically just parroting Bill Kristol and all that kind of neoconservative set about how badly the world needs us.
It was noted by Justin Armando in his piece at Antiwar.com today that the word Iraq doesn't appear in the speech anywhere.
But the big quintessential neoconservative project, when somebody finally listened to them and finally put them in charge of something, other than death squads in El Salvador back in the 80s, I guess, they did the Iraq War.
And it was their giant project to re-enact the Middle East.
So why would that be missing in this whole giant speech about how Kagan's right about everything?
They failed.
They failed in their war.
They lost the war.
Well, how do you measure that?
Well, I think that if you look at what were the goals of the U.S., not the official goals about democracy and things like that, but the real goals, consolidating U.S. power and U.S. control over Iraqi oil, didn't happen.
U.S. oil companies are in there, but they're just a few among a whole host of giant multinational oil corporations.
They wanted to leave behind a government in Iraq that would be completely supportive of the U.S. and would do anything the U.S. wanted.
Well, they didn't get that either.
Prime Minister Maliki practically won't talk to anybody in Washington.
They wanted to make sure that there would be permanent U.S. bases in Iraq.
There were over 500 bases at the time that the so-called SOFA, the Status of Forces Agreement, was trying to be negotiated.
Every one of them has been closed down or turned over to the Iraqi government.
The U.S. has no bases now in Iraq.
And crucially, they wanted to be able to use, to be able to rely on being able to use Iraq for the future as a jumping-off place to attack Iran.
Well, they goofed, and they put in power instead a government in Iraq that is now probably, if anything, more accountable to Iran than it is to the United States.
So that's the basis of saying that the neocons and their supporters in the White House failed.
Oh, you are so polite.
You are so polite, Phyllis.
You are just letting them off the hook so easily.
No, I'm just kidding, but you could be so much harder on them.
I mean, they gave the south of Iraq to Iran.
They believed Ahmed Chalabi when he said, we'll give you a Hashemite king and we'll build a water and an oil pipeline to Haifa and we'll be Israel's best friend from now on and we'll put all the pressure on Iran to be more like us and it will change the whole world.
But meanwhile, he was working for the Ayatollah all along and they were his stooges.
The bottom line is, I don't actually buy that.
I think that Iran has a certain amount of influence in Iraq.
It's a neighbor, after all, the largest trading partner.
And Iran and Iraq have been competitors for generations.
They have competed for resources.
They are the only two countries until now, until Turkey emerged financially much more solid, Iran and Iraq were the only two countries in that part of the world that had all of the indigenous capacity to be indigenous regional powers.
They had oil for money, they had water, and they had size.
They were the only ones who had all three.
And as a result, they competed with each other for all those years.
But they had both competitive and challenging and sometimes collaborative relationships.
Now they're back in a more collaborative mode with the new government in Iraq, but it's not at all clear how long that government will even survive.
This is not a government that has much support from its own population.
I think the danger that we face right now is not coming from Iraq.
It's not even coming from Iraq being used as a base to attack Iran, but because of the role that Israel is playing right now.
Unlike the run-up to the war in Iraq, where, yeah, Israel sort of jumped on the bandwagon, but not until fairly late in the game when it was already clear it was going to happen.
This time around, those who are supporting escalation against Iran, whether it's harsher sanctions, which of course also amount to a declaration of war, or direct military assault on Iran in what would be clearly an illegal preventive war.
This isn't even a preemptive war.
There's no emptive there.
There's no weapons.
The difference this time is that those neocons that are so keen on going after Iran are not in power.
They're not in the White House.
They're not in the Pentagon.
And they don't have the same level of influence.
And instead we actually have key government officials, crucially here in the White House, a few in the military, and the united position of all 16 US intelligence agencies all agree Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, is not building a nuclear weapon, and has not even made the decision about whether or not to build one in the future.
So given all that, the notion of going to war in Iran is far more insane than in a period where you could pretend that some leaders believed that there was a threat, as was claimed in Iraq.
Many of us said even back then, they don't believe it either.
It's a lie.
It's always been a lie, and they knew it was a lie.
But this time around, they're not even saying Iran has a weapon.
Iran has weapons of mass destruction.
They're hinting about it.
But when pressed, they say explicitly that there is no such threat.
The Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, was asked, are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon?
His answer, no.
Well, and the Israelis have said, their red line that's being crossed here is that they can't bomb the Fordow facility, so that if it's completely finished being up and operational, then that's what they want to prevent at all costs, basically.
Right.
The ability of the Iranians to ever make a nuke that they can't bomb.
Right.
The big problem that the U.S. faces, and of course because it's in the middle of an election cycle, it makes it much more tricky.
The Israeli red line is that they want to bomb to prevent Iran from ever becoming nuclear capable, meaning that they would have the capacity sometime in the future to build a bomb.
Now, the problem is to do that, you basically have to kill all the scientists, because the capacity to build a bomb really is about the knowledge.
And of course we've seen the assassination now of five Iranian scientists with Israeli officials who haven't quite said, we did it, but have virtually admitted being responsible for it and have publicly grinned, laughed, and done everything other than say explicitly, yeah, that was us and we're proud of it.
So we're seeing a move towards that.
The U.S. red line, and this is where there's a big difference between the U.S. and Israel, the U.S. red line is that Iran should not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, which when they have already said they don't have one, they're not building one, and they haven't even decided whether or not to build one in the future, shouldn't be a problem, but it is a problem because of the role that Israel is playing, the pressure that Israel's supporters in the U.S., in the right-wing Christian organizations, and in the more traditional Jewish-led pro-Israel lobbies, both of them, are putting enormous pressure on the administration to go to war, and of course this is operational in Congress as well, to go to war against Iran to accept the Israeli claims about what is dangerous and what isn't.
Okay, well what kind of chances do you give the upcoming talks?
The talks have already started.
The talks started about a week ago, and so far it seems to be going quite well.
The problem is on the Israeli side, they don't know how to take yes for an answer.
The talks have been rescheduled for the next session will be in mid-May, and all sides have said that they went very well, that it was a first step, but the problem that we face is that there's already a pushback.
There are now three bills in Congress calling for escalation against Iran, and those bills are all completely ignoring the reality of these talks.
If they acknowledge them at all, they're saying, well, we had a talk and they didn't collapse.
The Iranians didn't simply cave in and say, oh, okay, we will give up all enrichment activities, which of course are legal under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which they are a signatory to, and Israel, of course, is not.
But the move in Congress is to ignore the talks and simply go ahead and say the Iranians didn't simply collapse, didn't simply give in, and therefore it's a failure.
We have not had diplomatic relations with Iran for more than 30 years.
You don't get past that in the middle of this level of crisis, in the middle of a crisis with this level of escalating rhetoric and threat of war in one 45-minute session.
So the fact that they had one first session, said it went well, scheduled another, this is absolutely as good as we could possibly expect.
It seems to me like, on one hand, the politics are just so horrible, but on the other hand, the basis for common ground is so obvious and should be so easy if there's good faith all the way around, which that's the problem, right?
The real solution should be a nuclear weapons-free zone throughout the Middle East.
Right, exactly, so in other words, the politics are just a mess here.
Right, but we in civil society, we need to be fighting for that.
All right, everybody, I'm sorry, we've got to go.
It's Phyllis Bennis from the Institute for Policy Studies and the Transnational Institute.
She's got a piece at antiwar.com today, The Phases of War.
Thanks very much for your time, really appreciate it.
Thank you, it's been a pleasure.
